


Pâro

by Silex



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Bad Ending, Consensual Sex, F/M, Hand Jobs, Infected Characters, Non-Human Genitalia, Post-Canon, Teratophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:41:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24102283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: There were times when Jill wondered what would happen if she or Chris ended up infected, actually infected unlike her, lingering in quarantine with something not exactly dormant lurking in her bloodstream.What would it be like to watch helpless as the inevitable happened?
Relationships: Chris Redfield/Jill Valentine
Comments: 11
Kudos: 23
Collections: Id Pro Quo 2020





	Pâro

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HostisHumaniGeneris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HostisHumaniGeneris/gifts).



**Pâro**

_n._ the feeling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong—that any attempt to make your way comfortably through the world will only end up crossing some invisible taboo—as if there’s some obvious way forward that everybody else can see but you, each of them leaning back in their chair and calling out helpfully, _colder, colder, colder_.

– _The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows_

~oOo~

There were times when Jill wondered what would happen if she or Chris ended up infected, actually infected unlike her, lingering in quarantine with something not exactly dormant lurking in her bloodstream.

What would it be like to watch helpless as the inevitable happened?

Sometimes she still had nightmares of watching her own flesh rot away before her eyes, like the hallucinations she’d had after being infected with the T-virus. She’d been cured, thankfully, but the nightmares had lingered on for years.

There were the dreams that started out with her knowing that Chris was in trouble, that she needed to rescue him. She would rush down impossible hallways that grew too long for her to reach the end of, despite her certainty that Chris waited on the other side of a door that always seemed to be retreating. There would, inevitably, be a moment where she lowered her guard and there would be a Tyrant. It would charge her and then stop and she would know.

It was Chris.

Other times she dreamed that on some mission with her, Chris fell victim to some unknown virus, her watching helpless as he would twist and change into something unrecognizable, a monster. He would charge her and she knew that she had to shoot him, but there was always some reason she couldn’t.

Then she would wake up in a cold sweat, feeling horror for all of the wrong reasons.

More often than not, her dreams were simply about B.O.W.s. Hunters, lickers, whatever new thing they’d encountered on their latest mission, except that she was helpless and unable to defend herself.

Those dreams were slightly better. At least with them her subconscious wasn’t torturing her with morbid what-ifs that she couldn’t even be terrified of the way she was supposed to be.

She never talked to Chris about those dreams, that had started shortly after what they’d been through in the mansion.

He wouldn’t understand. Steadfast and reliable, and tormented in his own way, he wouldn’t get _why_ she had those dreams.

She hardly understood them herself, but at the same time she knew that she was far from alone.

She couldn’t say that she was in good company, but there were other people out there.

Other people with a similar fascination with monsters, because Frankenstein’s monster, werewolves and all sorts of creatures of the night had existed well before B.O.W.s.

Back when she was a little girl she’d been watching old movies, black and white with her grandfather, monster movies, and though she’d been too young to fully realize it at the time, something about them stuck with her, left an indelible impression so profound that it took her years to understand.

Monsters fascinated her in a way she couldn’t put into words.

When she reached her teens and her classmates asked her which movie star she had a crush on she’d always lie and go with whoever was most popular. Because even then, before monsters were real, she’d known that she couldn’t admit to fantasizing about the Gill-man.

It was something that, she told herself would get better with time, it was just her imagination.

Monsters weren’t real.

And then they were.

That should have cured her of her fascination, she’d been sure of it. Seeing what B.O.W.s were capable of firsthand should have been an end to her interest in monsters.

Instead it only provided her with new things to think about.

From her childhood crush on the Gill-man it wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine that hunters were _cute_ and far worse things than that.

If anything, after everything she’d been through, it only got worse.

As Wesker’s captive she had been forced to follow orders, but even when she wasn’t told to, when she was free to act on her own, she’d watch the lickers in the basement of the facility. The males, half human and brutal, fascinated her, and when she was told to assist in ‘introducing’ one of them to a female she would watch with rapt attention that went beyond the orders she had been given to observe, something that wasn’t lost on Wesker. He made barbed comments, but never inquired in such a way that would force her to admit what she was imagining.

Maybe she’d been crazy at the time, between the P-30 and whatever else Wesker had decided to test on her she was more than half out of her mind, so she could hardly be blamed for grasping at any train of thought that would allow her to escape her torment.

Her mind was all that belonged to her and, with rescue an impossibility, it was easier to imagine monsters than it was to imagine Chris.

Not when, with each passing day, he seemed farther and farther away and an unpleasant end for her had felt increasingly certain.

Working with Uroboros, being used as Wesker’s unwilling assistant and test subject, she was sure that any day Wesker would take the last thing from her that he could – her humanity. It was something she dreaded, but at the same time it would have been a relief, as she was already his pet monster.

Stomach churning dread, but also a thrill of excitement at the thought of the impossible, her skin splitting as tentacles and claws tore their way through even as she retained enough of herself to…

Appreciate what she had become, and, if she was lucky, find it in herself to finally turn against Wesker.

It was the one revenge fantasy that she allowed herself, because anything else felt too impossible.

Thankfully Chris rescued her and brought an end to those dark wonderings.

Mostly.

Maybe if she’d been allowed back on active duty it would have been. Then there would have been more distractions, more to focus on, but once again she ended up trapped with only her thoughts for company.

She was kept in quarantine because of the virus or viruses – that was something that was never made clear to her, still active in her bloodstream. Still infectious, but not doing anything to her.

Nothing.

What they might do to another person though, someone _normal_ …

Someone who didn’t have to struggle to remind themselves that being a monster would be so much worse than being trapped in quarantine indefinitely, but still human, was unknown.

And like that her relationship with Chris became strictly ‘look, but don’t touch’.

He did come to visit her though, which was something.

Something for her to hold onto and keep her grounded.

In between Lanshiang, Louisiana, a miserable trip back to Edonia when the situation there worsened again, and then home, he found time to visit her. Mostly they talked, him keeping her posted on what she was missing, her trying to think of things to say that they hadn’t already discussed.

There was so little for her to do in quarantine, waiting and worrying, and not much else.

The thought that she was running out of things to say, to hold Chris’ interest, horrified her and each visit brought her closer and closer to confessing her nightmares.

And her _interests_.

Because it would be something new, something he didn’t already know, and maybe drive him away to something better, someone who he could actually live his life with rather than simply visiting when he had the chance.

But she held her tongue and he kept coming back.

Even though he shouldn’t have been leaving in the first place.

He’d done enough, been through enough, that retirement shouldn’t have been _an_ option, it should have been _the_ _only_ option. They let him keep at it though, out of respect or desperation or something.

She didn’t know, but she could guess.

Chris was saving the world for the two of them now, going out because she couldn’t.

All she could do was wait.

She was privileged enough to retain some semblance of rank, was kept in the loop of when he’d be called back, so his leaving was never a surprise, and they tried to give her estimates of when he would return. He was late more often than not, leaving her to do her best not to pace like a trapped animal, waiting anxiously for her life to continue.

Then one day it happened, he came back early.

She wasn’t supposed to have been told though, she knew that right away, when the doctor telling her that went pale when his pager buzzed and he rushed from the room.

Chris was back.

And the quarantine wing had another resident.

She was told nothing, didn’t see them brought in because they were elsewhere, but she could hear the conversations, pickup what wasn’t said in hushed tones and averted eyes.

The day Chris had been supposed to return came and went without him returning, not officially at least. Better for him to be yet another agent who ended up MIA.

Except she knew better, he was already there and no one was telling her anything, which was how she knew beyond all doubt.

She could have demanded answers and probably would have gotten them, but she didn’t

Because she didn’t want to know, she didn’t need more to fuel her imaginings, not when, without fail, they always went in the wrong direction. What she hadn’t been told was already more than enough for that.

She _hadn’t_ been told that Chris was dead, which meant two things – he was still alive and that he was in condition where he couldn’t be written off as dead. There were plenty of possible explanations for that, but because of everything else that she hadn’t been told, her mind went, without fail, to worst case scenarios.

Chris had been infected, somehow, with something.

And he was still alive.

And still being kept in the same facility as she was.

Because though, in time, talk of Chris coming back stopped, she had yet to be told that he was dead.

Part of it may have been out of concern for her, but she suspected that it was a very minor part of it all. Bad as the situation may have been, and she had reason to believe that it was bad, it seemed that someone was still holding on to some hope.

It wasn’t her, that was for sure, because when she tried she did it all wrong.

Instead she came up with reasons for why Chris had been brought, in secret, to the same facility as her.

It was an easy enough game, the kind that she’d had for years with Wesker.

Space was limited – there were only so many BSAA facilities equipped to hold someone in quarantine long term after all. Keeping the two of them in the same place helped consolidate resources.

Or it was an attempt to avoid scandal. Her being there was already an open secret, so people were less likely to ask questions and more likely to make the wrong assumptions about what was going on – that it was just her.

The only problem was, as days stretched into weeks, the not knowing started to wear on her.

Simply not knowing, she decided, would have been easy, but suspecting that Chris was in the same facility and that all she needed to do was ask to find out more than she was supposed to made it harder.

Asking would be so much simpler that imagining.

That way she’d be able to stop feeling guilty about the directions her thoughts always went in.

She’d imagined, in detail, what an eventual reunion with Chris would be like and it felt disrespectful to think of him that way.

An answer would bring an end to that and, maybe, would finally fix whatever it was that was wrong with her.

She could hope.

Asking was easy, too easy.

Chris had been injured on his last mission when his squad had gotten separated, because that was always how it went. No matter how you tried to stick together, something would always happen. B.O.W.s and the situations they ended up being used in were too unpredictable.

He’d managed to get as many of his men out as he could, despite his injuries, and then his condition, which was already bad, had started to deteriorate.

They’d brought him back though, and that was the most that anyone was willing to talk about.

Apparently there were some things that couldn’t be discussed, even with her.

After that the doctor, or maybe scientist, she didn’t bother differentiating between the different people monitoring her condition to be sure it remained stable, had gotten evasive. Sensing that the conversation had reached the point where he’d said all that he was willing to she ended it with a request, that word get passed on to Chris that she missed him and hoped he was okay.

Because that felt safer than demanding that she be allowed to visit him and it was easier to play along and pretend to be ignorant.

That evening, sooner than expected, she was told that Chris was fine, but he was worried about her.

Because of course he was worried about her. He always put others first, always.

Their relationship, strange as it had become, or perhaps had always been, took on another degree of separation.

Banalities relayed back and forth through whoever was willing to humor her.

Chris was always fine, or bored, or not in the mood to talk, but mostly he was worried about her, asking all the questions that he always did about how she was doing, if she was alright.

She answered and struggled to find questions to ask him.

It took several weeks of running out of things to say before she got up the courage to ask if she could visit.

She had free roam of the facility, within reason, but there were places that she wasn’t allowed to go.

Onto the elevator to the floor below was one of those places, previously because there’d been nothing there other than empty holding cells. Now it was because access was restricted.

She could have tried demanding, it might have actually worked, but instead she asked, in the most innocent way she could, if she could go visit Chris, still playing the game that she was ignorant and that everything was fine.

It took a day for her to get an answer to that one, longer than usual and she could imagine the doctors and scientists debating whether or not to tell Chris she was going to visit him and then hemming and hawing on whether or not to actually let her.

No, they told her, and then apologized, explaining that Chris didn’t want her to visit.

She could have asked why and gotten the truth, she was sure of it, but instead she nodded and said that she understood.

The game of pretense was over.

Chris didn’t want her to see him, which made her want to see him all the more, to tell him that it was fine and that she didn’t care.

Even when the nightmare became real she couldn’t bring herself to feel the right emotions, though she was sure anyone would feel the same morbid curiosity as her.

How bad was it?

Bad enough that, always putting others before himself, he was trying to protect her from what he imagined her reaction would be.

At the same time that implied it couldn’t possibly be _that_ bad, because his response was so utterly Chris that she was almost able to believe that he was fine.

Except if he was fine she would have been allowed to see him already.

Unless…

What if it really had just been an injury?

Something mundane that had left permanent damage?

Given their line of work it was almost expected that the end of it would involve going down in a blaze of glory, fighting against impossible odds until the inevitable. Getting infected with something didn’t preclude that possibility, or so she’d thought until Wesker and what followed.

Her stuck waiting while Chris kept going.

Maybe the only reason she’d assumed he was infected was because of the way he’d dwelt on that possibility ever since Lanshiang. It had come up so many times in conversation that there were times when she felt like he was mocking her, daring her to tell the truth and give the wrong answer. Of course he wasn’t mocking her, but there was a reason for it, one he didn’t talk about. He’d seen something and it haunted him.

Why would the BSAA try to hide a simple injury though?

The answer was obvious.

She and Chris were such an important part of the organization, symbolic of it by virtue of having been there from the start. Raccoon City defined them and left them so much more than what they were.

With her infected and in limbo and Chris injured in some way that he’d never recover, it would be a huge blow to the BSAA. Better to keep things uncertain than to let the truth out that two of its founding members were permanently out of commission in unimaginably mundane ends.

She knew that when she’d been believed dead she’d been made into a martyr of sorts, because the idea of her sacrificing herself to kill Wesker, there was some sort of moral to that story. An ideal to aspire to.

Her lingering in quarantine, infected but stable, it was a situation that would horrify anyone who knew about it.

Chris laid low after all he’d done, the way he just kept going? That was even worse.

So they’d linger, the BSAA’s dirty little secret.

Maybe not knowing would be better, let the two of them hold onto their dignity and pretend that nothing was wrong and maybe someday things would fix themselves.

Expect she’d spent too long pretending that, too long imagining impossible what-ifs. She couldn’t live out the rest of her life that way, fantasizing about the way things should have been.

Jill persisted, trying to get answers.

Eventually Chris relented and said that she could visit.

As she’d expected he was on the floor below where she was kept, down in one of the holding cells. Chris was the first occupant of that particular floor, reserved for an instance where the BSAA captured something rather than destroying it, or for particular sorts of worst case situations that had never happened until now.

She wasn’t allowed to make the trip alone with her thoughts the way she would have liked to. A doctor she knew only in passing, because she didn’t know everyone in the facility, accompanied her. To some degree she’d made it a point of not getting to know certain people despite the length of her stay. It made things easier, something that held true in this situation.

She didn’t have to take his warnings personally because it wasn’t personal. He didn’t try to soften things or talk to her like a friend or try and comfort her. The detachment helped her listen to his warnings mixed with reassurances – that Chris was mentally stable right now, though he did have impulse control issues, which was expected given his condition.

One of those things had always been true, whatever had happened likely making little difference. The other hadn’t been true for years, maybe since the start of it in Raccoon City, or before even, but it applied to both of them. Why else would they have kept going through it all, given up so much all for so little reward in the end? Maybe they’d saved the world, maybe they’d only postponed the inevitable for just that much longer.

She was warned about Chris’ condition in the vaguest possible ways. He’d been injured badly, that there were scars and complications, some of them coming from treatment being delayed. Apparently this particular doctor didn’t know Chris very well and was surprised that Chris had pushed on and finished the mission before letting himself receive treatment.

As for the nature of his injuries, he’d been bitten by some kind of experimental B.O.W.

The bite, or bites, because the doctor couldn’t seem to keep that detail straight, had been bad and had ended up infected.

There were scars, the doctor had reminded her a final time as they walked down the hall, scars and other complications.

Maybe she should have feigned ignorance and asked what he meant.

The last warning the doctor gave her as she brushed past him was that she should try not to stare because Chris didn’t like that.

It was, of every stupid thing that she’d heard during her time in quarantine, one of the stupidest things she’d heard, because as soon as she was told that she could visit Chris she was also warned that she wouldn’t be allowed in the same room as him. All they’d be able to do was stare at each other through the viewing window and maybe talk if Chris was feeling up to it, because she’d also been warned that, possibly because of his injuries, Chris had a hard time talking.

She looked in the viewing window, saw Chris standing, looking tense in the far corner of the room and had to look away before she could see much more.

Tears stung her eyes and her face burned with shame, not because she couldn’t stand the sight of what she saw, but because she’d caught a glimpse of scales and claws and immediately thought of her first crush on a movie star.

The Gill-man.

“Sorry,” Chris rasped, misunderstanding her reaction, as though there was any reason for him to apologize.

“No, it’s just…I…” she turned to glance at him out of the corner of her eye. This was Chris, the scales made things worse, not better. It was perfectly normal for her to wish that she could be in there with him, wanting to hug him. Wondering how those scales would feel, that wasn’t normal, “I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

For plenty of things, none of which she could explain.

Instead she turned to Chris, trying to figure out what was safe to look at.

The fangs, long enough that he couldn’t close his mouth properly probably explained why it was so hard for him to talk. That and the half healed injury that covered the right side of his face. It looked like it had gone bone deep and was all raw flesh, black eschar and clusters of little scales that had grown in without any pattern or direction, some of them even dotting the empty socket where his eye should have been.

His remaining eye was unchanged, even if the muscle and bone it was set in had changed subtly, making the uninjured side of his face less expressive.

If she could focus on his eye and not the little lumps beneath the skin around it where it looked like scales had started to grow, but never made it to the surface of his skin, things would be fine.

That way she wouldn’t have to think about how, despite what had happened to him, he was still handsome.

The scales, though she didn’t want to think too much about it, helped.

She’d thought hunters were cute…

Chris made a sound that she couldn’t place any meaning on, and sat down along the side of the room at an angle where he was mostly out of sight.

“Happy now?”

She honestly wasn’t sure what she was, but she did know that ‘yes’ wasn’t the right answer, if there even was a right answer.

“I’ve been better,” she said quietly, more so than she’d planned.

Chris laughed.

~oOo~

The first visit had gone about as well as could be expected, them talking about whatever was safe, which meant a lot of nothing, and avoiding eye contact if either of them felt that they’d been looking for too long.

Jill surprised herself by being ready for another visit sooner rather than later and Chris agreed to it with little protest.

She was still escorted to where he was kept, but at least she didn’t have to endure the stupid, pointless warnings again. Somehow that, more than being ready for what she was going to see, made things easier.

This time when she got there he was already standing against a wall at an angle that made it hard to see him through the viewing window, a sign that the look she’d gotten of him during her first visit was a onetime thing, just to let her know the situation and see her reaction.

There was something about the way he was standing, how the position meant that she could hardly see him unless she leaned against the glass, made her think that this was his preferred place to be, that he knew that he couldn’t be seen. It was something she could relate to.

Whatever the reason he was more relaxed.

“Hey,” he greeted her, the word having a hard time getting past his fangs.

“Hey back at you,” she smiled, though he wasn’t looking her way.

She could see, at most one shoulder and part of his back because he was facing away from her, leaning against the wall. There were irregular lines of scales, the skin around them discolored and tight over muscle.

Chris shrugged and made some small, noncommittal noise.

Without anything else to look at, she stared at the inside of the cell.

It was completely empty with stark white walls.

It was meant to contain B.O.W.s, she reminded herself, but this was Chris.

He deserved better.

“Are they treating you okay?”

It was a question that had come up in countless phone calls, when Chris hadn’t been able to visit her. She didn’t like to be in the situation here she was asking it, but she was worried.

His response was a noise that took her far too long to place as a laugh and then, “Yes.”

“Are you sure? Is there anything you need?” As though her demanding something for him would do any good.

Though it might, she still wasn’t sure how much say she had in things.

“Jill,” the word was little more than a growl as he pushed away from the wall and walked over to her.

He was taller now, something she hadn’t noticed during the first visit when there’s been so much more for her to try to take in, even stooped over, shoulders slumped, he was visibly larger.

He bent down, leaning awkwardly against the viewing window to look her in the eye. He knew where she was going with that line of questioning, that she was working up to asking if she should come into the room with him.

“I…” he opened and closed his mouth several times, giving he a good view of far too many fangs, the muscles of his face twitching as he struggled to talk, “I’m dangerous.”

“But only if you bite me, right?” She tried to make a joke of it, because back when Chris had first asked about what she was infected with, if the reason she was being kept in quarantine was because it was dangerous, he’d answered by paraphrasing what she’d been told, that barring her biting someone she probably wasn’t contagious, but that could change without warning.

Chris didn’t laugh so she tried to change the topic of conversation, if it could be called a conversation when she struggled to think of what to say, lapsing into long silences between Chris’ one to two word replies.

The conversation seemed to put Chris in a better mood, though Jill couldn’t be sure if he was doing it for her benefit. With Chris there were times when he was too selfless for his own good.

Towards the end of the visit she’d brought up that she might see about getting permission to go in with him during their next visit.

At least then, sitting together, next to each other the too long silences might feel comfortable rather than awkward and maybe she’d feel less helpless about how she felt, what she still felt for Chris.

He’d started to say yes, she was sure of it, but then he shook his head and refused to even humor the idea after that.

It was ironic given that previously he was the one ignoring safety and protocol when he visited her, gently, and often successfully, urging her to bend the rules a little, that no one would know or care.

After that they made a few more attempts at conversation before giving up.

That evening a guard came to talk with her.

She’d expected the worst when she saw him walking down the hall towards her, though at this point she had no idea what the worst would entail.

He smiled at her, which instantly put her on guard. She did not need reassurances or kind words after all she’d been through and she most definitely didn’t need carefully rehearsed sympathy.

His shift had just ended, he explained, and earlier Chris had asked if he could show Jill some footage from the security cameras, from back when Chris had first arrived.

The guard, Jill realized, was nervous though she couldn’t figure out why. She could assume though, that he didn’t like ending up put in the middle of the situation between her and Chris.

Tough for him.

He brought her to the control room for that wing of the facility, a place that Jill had been plenty of times before. There were a few guards she considered friends and would sometimes visit them when she was bored. This particular young man wasn’t one of them, he was too new to the place and this was the first time he’d even acknowledged her other than to ask what she was doing wandering around, so she typically ignored him if she could.

He sat down at one of the computers, without bothering to offer Jill a chair, so she stood, leaning over him.

He leaned away from her as he pulled up old files.

The first clip was of Chris pacing the room, yelling at someone through the viewing window, though without sound she could only guess at what he was saying, if he was saying anything at all.

As it went on Chris grew more agitated, pounding his hands against the glass and snarling before throwing himself at it.

The next clip was him standing at the far corner of his cell, waiting as a tray was pushed through the door. He went over to it and, for several seconds, fumbled with a fork and knife, his claws making it impossible, before throwing them across the room and tearing into what Jill hoped was a cooked steak.

More footage of him pacing the room, lashing out randomly.

A clip of him talking to someone through the viewing window before, seemingly out of nowhere, attacking the glass.

If the footage was supposed to frighten her off, make her afraid that Chris might lose control and hurt her, it wasn’t working.

Especially when she looked over at the security feed from Chris’ cell, seeing him sitting in a corner looking bored and tired.

“He’s better now though.”

She’d said that because saying what was actually on her mind, that she was more determined now than ever to get into the cell with him, wouldn’t have been helpful.

Forcing Chris to do something that he didn’t want to was impossible, even for her. On the other hand she knew the kind of coaxing and patience it took to, eventually, win him over to doing something.

He wanted to warn her, make her understand that he wasn’t human any more, but that wouldn’t help in the way he wanted it to.

Her first crush had been on the creature from the Black Lagoon.

She thought that hunters were cute.

And seeing Chris at his worst, acting like the B.O.W. that he was, only made her want to be with him all the more.

She finally had the monster she’d fantasized about, but it was Chris, which made it brave for her to want to be with him rather than terrible. There was nothing wrong with still loving him despite what he had become.

And everything wrong with wanting him just as much, if not more, because of it.

~oOo~

Chris had seemed surprised when she showed up to visit him the next day. He did a near perfect double take at the sight of her and then retreated to stand where he had during the previous visit, so that he was almost out of sight. At least this time he was facing her.

“Why?” She demanded, trying to lean so that she could look directly at him.

“I wanted,” he paused to swallow, something that the fangs and not being able to close his mouth seemed to make difficult for him, “You to know before you asked.”

“Asked what?” She demanded, trying not to be angry. He wasn’t going to frighten her away, not after all they’d been through together and apart. He’d refused to give up hope when everyone had believed, not without reason, that she was dead, he’d waited for her to be let out of quarantine, and when that never happened he’d still come to visit her, looked after her when he could have moved on. That he was worried about her, what she would think about seeing him at his worse, hurt her, especially when, if he was afraid that he might hurt her, it was proof that he wouldn’t.

Whatever happened, he was still Chris and she trusted him.

It hurt that, after she’d been the one to try and kill him, albeit while under Wesker’s control, he could forgive her, but expected her to run away when he hadn’t done anything to her.

Chris leaned to look at her and then, pointedly, at the door to his cell.

“You didn’t leave me after what happened,” she countered with the closest she could come to saying what was on her mind, “They don’t even know what I’m infected with.”

He winced. The uncertainty of her condition was something that neither of them liked to think about.

“You’re still –” he stopped and growled.

He’d been about to say that she was still human, but after what Wesker had done to her, the fact that the T-virus was still active in her blood, what she was was debatable.

That was the larger half of why she was still in quarantine. After everything she’d been through, the P-30 and everything else she’d been exposed to there were some things that just weren’t quite right. Most of it she didn’t understand beyond what it meant.

Appearance aside, she probably had more in common with Chris than she did with a normal person. The T-virus and everything that came from it was funny that way.

“It’s fine,” she smiled at him, letting him know that it really was. All things considered his situation was far worse and she wasn’t going to hold that against him, as though she could have in any circumstances.

Chris looked at her again, then looked away, rubbing distractedly at the right side of his face, claws getting dangerously close to the still raw looking pit where his eye should have been. The rest of the injury was healing, slowly, but given how bad it was it made sense. B.O.W.s could shrug off all sorts of damage and keep going, but not all of them could heal that much better than a person and she didn’t even know what Chris was infected with. His eye probably wasn’t going to come back, and even if it did it wouldn’t be the same.

It was, she realized, something that probably would have bothered Chris a lot more than it would have her.

“How are you holding up?” Jill asked, not the best attempt at changing the subject, but anywhere the conversation could go had to be better.

“About expected,” he laughed bitterly, “I fucked up.”

She didn’t know the details of his last mission, what exactly had happened, other than that he’d been somewhere in the American southwest helping clear a lab. Information beyond that was sparse, the location such that there were a lot of agencies looking to point fingers and deny responsibility. There’d even been some argument over whether or not the BSAA should have been involved at all. A decision had been made, or had taken too long being made and something happened that required the BSAA to act and that was all she knew.

Except that she was sure that Chris hadn’t ‘fucked up’ and she said as much.

Whatever had gone wrong, if anything even had, because sometimes horrible things just happened and there was nothing anybody could do about it, it wasn’t his fault.

Chris looked at her and tried to smile. It was horrible, or it should have been. She should have recoiled, or gone pale or done something other than smile back. Yes, this was Chris, infected or not, but she knew she was taking things too well.

“It’s…” he sat down, looking at his hands, “I didn’t expect this.”

With the close calls it had only been a matter of time, on some level they’d always known that they could only escape impossible odds so many times. She’d been lucky, or unlucky enough to survive, so they’d both assumed that when it happened for him he just wouldn’t make it back from that last mission.

“It could be worse,” she said quickly, ready to argue that point for purely selfish reasons. If Chris hadn’t made it back she’d be alone and then she didn’t know what she’d do with herself.

“It could be,” he surprised her by agreeing.

“You’re still you,” she started and then immediately stopped herself, not sure which of them she was trying to reassure. Because after all these years being attracted to a B.O.W. was fine if it was Chris, wasn’t it? She’d always loved him and that shouldn’t have changed.

No one would judge her for it, for looking past what had happened to him.

Except she wasn’t looking past it.

Not at all.

It was probably the last thing that Chris needed to hear given his state and she felt awful for thinking it, but it gave her hope.

A sort of twisted little hope that somehow, in the end, things would be fine because this way she wasn’t alone and because she finally had something she’d always longed for.

“I am,” was his begrudging reply, “Mostly.”

She’d been warned by the doctors that they didn’t know how bad things were going to be. Chris was mentally stable, meaning that there’d been no further decline since his arrival, but still he wasn’t the same. Physically, there was no telling. Things had slowed down, but they hadn’t stopped.

“I’m not afraid,” she blurted out before she could think better of it. It was something she had to say, something that Chris needed to know.

“Thanks, I…” he trailed off.

Shaking his head he got up and started to pace, growling softly to himself.

That was surprisingly normal. Chris got restless, and being trapped in the containment cell must have been hell for him. It would be a long time before she could convince anyone that he should be allowed out, but she planned on trying because she knew how much she hated those first months of quarantine, until it had been proven that her involvement in Wesker’s plans had been purely involuntary.

First though, she had to convince Chris of it.

His growling grew increasingly irritated.

“Are you okay?” she leaned against the viewing window, genuinely concerned.

“Yes,” a growl, “No. Fuck!”

He took a swing at the wall, not punching it, but swiping it with an open hand so that his claws dragged across it.

She took a step back, “Should I leave?”

She still wasn’t afraid of him, but she didn’t know what to do. Seeing Chris in the state he was in and not being able to do anything was a sort of helplessness akin to what she’d felt under the P-30. There was so much she wanted to do, but no way to do any of it.

Chris shook his head violently, “No. Keep talking.”

“About what?” Having no idea what set him off meant that she had no clue what was safe to talk about.

“Anything.”

Anything was difficult when she’d relied so long on Chris being the one with something to talk about. With her it was just more of the same, nothing getting any better or worse.

“‘s hard to focus,” he continued, “You talking helps.”

The phone call she’d gotten from Barry last week wasn’t much, but it was a something.

As she told the long, rambling and rather ridiculous story that Barry had relayed to her about Polly, Moira and Natalia, Chris calmed down. Eventually he stopped pacing and sat back down in his spot along the wall. He didn’t say anything, but he occasionally laughed so she knew he was listening.

It was a very Barry story, just what was needed to lighten the mood.

~oOo~

It took time, but she started to get answers. She could have gotten them more quickly from the doctors, but doing that felt too much like going behind Chris’ back.

They took their time getting to know each other again, figuring out what had changed and what was the same and she didn’t want to push too hard, too fast. Mostly they were feeling things out to see if anything had changed between them, each trying not to tip their hand.

She told herself that she didn’t care that Chris was a B.O.W., and that if she did, but more in the way of trying something new to spice up a long term relationship, it didn’t matter. As long as she didn’t say anything on the subject there was no danger.

With Chris it was harder to tell, or maybe equally hard to tell given all that she wasn’t saying, he obviously still cared about her, but with everything else that had changed about him how exactly he felt was difficult to make sense of. He was angry, which he had every right to be, though how much of it was at himself, at his situation, and how much of it was the confused mess of instincts that he now possessed was hard to tell.

All she knew for sure was that none of it was ever directed at her.

There were times when he’d ask for her to visit so they could talk, and over time he had more to say, either getting better at focusing or figuring out how to get the words out through fangs.

Then there were times where she was called down to talk to him.

During those times she got to see him at his worst, pacing the room, lashing out blindly and acting like the monster he’d become.

A monster, not a B.O.W., because his infection was accidental. Of the two of them she was the closest to being a B.O.W., what Wesker had done to her being deliberate with the goal of using her for whatever purpose suited him at any given moment.

Seeing Chris during the bad times was difficult, for both of them, but she could tell her being there for him helped. Eventually the growling and roaring would subside to muttering and swearing and eventually she would be able to find out what had him upset in the first place, if there had been anything to begin with. Sometimes it would just happen, anger for no reason, and he would lash out. It rarely started when she was there, but there had been a few times when it got close, a misfiring of instincts and impulses fighting with an otherwise human mind.

Talking to him helped and more and more they were having actual conversations. It wasn’t easy for him to talk, finding the right words could be a struggle for him, but he was getting better. The random rages began to subside, though they could still happen without warning, frustration at not being able to say what he was thinking, or even make sense of it, getting to be too much.

The problem, Jill realized, wasn’t how much he had changed, but how much was the same.

As he got better she started asking if there was anything she could do to help, anything she could try to get for him to make things more comfortable. It was, in her mind, the first step towards actually getting him to agree to let him into the containment cell.

In asking she learned more about his state.

An offer of books or a television to try and help him with boredom was met with a dismissive snort. He didn’t get bored much at this point, he explained, or at least he didn’t think so, and even if he did reading would take too much concentration. The same was true of TV, he didn’t trust himself not to get angry at some stupid little thing and for now it was best not to take and chances. Not when he was making progress.

Getting someone to go out and bring him better food, something to break up the monotony of whatever was being served at the facility that day was also, sadly, out of the question. Chris had explained that they’d tried, because asking for a cup of coffee was a small enough request that it had been granted without hesitation. Unfortunately, that his sense of taste had changed was one of the first things that had been discovered after his arrival.

He had, as far as he could figure, lost most of his sense of taste and his sense of smell wasn’t quite right either. Things he’d previously enjoyed didn’t taste like food anymore, he couldn’t explain it other than it was like having a cold, but his sense of smell was fine. He could eat pretty much anything, but most of it was either flavorless or smelled wrong. It was, he guessed, a case of things not lining up. And then there was the matter of whatever internal changes had happened and those he didn’t want to talk about. Food wasn’t a pleasant subject for him and that was where she let the matter drop.

She was at least able to get the doctors to get him something to wear, which he said did help. He’d stopped flying into blind rages as often so there was less of a chance that he’d shred it in frustration over some minor thing and going through the motions of dressing and undressing helped him with coordination. He didn’t think that he’d ever have the same range of motion in his hands that he’d had before, but he was adjusting.

The doctors were still trying to find ways to help him recover, in as much as that was possible, but it wasn’t that much of a priority compared to everything else.

What everything else encompassed was a lot because Chris was the BSAA’s first chance for a long term study on someone infected with a progenitor derived virus other than Jill and her situation was so unique as to be nearly useless for research.

Something, he hoped, could be gained from his situation. Watching what the virus was doing to him, what was and wasn’t changing might offer some understanding, the possibility of an eventual treatment for people who ended up infected, rather than just vaccines to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Ever since Edonia and China there’d been a lot of talk of treatments because of the staggering number of J’avo that had been created during those incidents and appearing elsewhere since then. The C-virus had changed things and the BSAA was struggling to keep up with, not simply the ever changing viruses being used, but a constantly shifting legal and political landscape created by the consequences of those viruses. J’avo, violent as they were, still retained most of their intelligence after all and were causing questions to be raised about how to best deal with B.O.W.s that were uncomfortably close to being human.

It was something Jill understood too well, being in an uncomfortable position on the spectrum from B.O.W. to human. The doctors were still trying to figure out why what had happened to her had been so minor when the T-virus was still active in her. If they could figure out what made her or her strain unique there was the chance of making some use of it.

Keeping Chris could be justified because he worked for the agency and was being kept for study, but who would be responsible for a J’avo if it surrendered? Would it be a B.O.W. or a human combatant? Having a cure for the virus would make that issue easier.

For the rest of the world it might have meant for something, but for her and Chris it was waiting and wondering.

The wondering more than the waiting was what made things difficult and they both did what they could to pass the time.

Jill was the one who suggested, after Chris complained that sitting around doing nothing was frustrating, that she try and get him some dumbbells so he could at least work out. He’d liked that idea and it made her visits with him more interesting.

He no longer tried to keep away, out of sight, which gave her the chance to really see what he looked like.

The changes, as far as she was concerned, were minor, claws and fangs and scales. As B.O.W.s went, which was the best comparison, he was still almost completely human, far from the most horrific thing that she had fantasized about.

Still, his wasn’t an even change. The patches of scales were random, mottled gray and black with specks almost the same color as his hair and streaks of oily green iridescence. Where they began and ended wasn’t easy to determine as there were patches of otherwise normal skin discolored to a sickly gray.

The asymmetry wasn’t a turnoff either, not that she could ever say that when Chris seemed to find it the worst part of what had happened to him, as though things being more uniform would have made a difference.

Watching him work out, figuring out how to keep his claws out of the way, was enthralling. That he worked out shirtless wasn’t something she would complain about, even if it meant that she could see how much of his body was covered by scales and how the pattern of them was different on his back than it was on his chest.

Being able to do something between her visits, even if it was just working out, did seem to help Chris. The rages abated, mostly.

There was the day she went down to visit Chris and saw that one of the dumbbells was broken.

When she asked about it Chris just shrugged.

“Wing one of ‘em at the wall hard enough and it’ll happen,” he laughed.

That he was able to laugh about it meant a lot.

Progress was being made, finally.

If she was lucky it was only a matter of time before she was in there with him.

Able to touch him again.

To trace her fingers along those scales, feel the texture of them and find the edges where they met with normal skin.

That last part was wrong and she knew it, but she still wanted to.

~oOo~

The story finally came out, in bits and pieces.

They were talking about nothing in particular when Chris brought it up.

“I didn’t see it at first,” he looked at her, sheepishly out of his remaining eye, as though embarrassed that his luck had finally run out, because what other than luck could have brought them as far as they’d made it? “It was like a lizard.”

She looked at him, trying to figure out what to say to that. It felt like something where she should have had a response to.

“A chameleon,” he growled, then blinked, as though surprised by the noise. Jill wasn’t sure if it was that the suggestion had sparked her imagination, but the colors of his scales changed, brighter or darker, or there was some shift in the pattern. She tried not to stare as he continued because longer conversations that he was the one to start were still infrequent, “It was impossible to see until it attacked.”

Claws clenched and unclenched giving Jill something else to stare at. His hands weren’t the same, there were the claws and scales of course, but the fingers on his right hand were longer and there were only four of them, the thumb little more than a wickedly curved spur of bone.

It wouldn’t have been the first B.O.W. capable of changing colors out there, but thankfully they were relatively rare. Either the method hadn’t been shared or what made the trait happen was difficult to replicate.

Either way invisible B.O.W.s were something that were known, but not common enough that anyone was ever on the lookout for them.

“It’s not your fault,” she said, still not sure if it was the right thing to say. All she knew was that she had to say something.

Chris growled, “I could have done more.”

After that he didn’t say anything more, just stared into the distance as she talked to him, offering meaningless reassurances for lack of anything better to say.

That wasn’t anything new. Chris had always been prone to brooding and it had only gotten worse since Edonia, or maybe before that. Maybe it had begun after she tackled Wesker out that window and when Chris had saved her once again being in control of herself had made everything so new that she hadn’t seen it.

There’d been a lot that she might have missed, things that went unnoticed because she didn’t even know to look for them until after the fact.

The incidents in Edonia and China though, there was more to them than she knew, a reason why Chris hadn’t come back from the first and why he’d been so badly shaken after the second. He hadn’t told her yet and she hadn’t asked, but eventually that story might come out as well.

Her one-sided conversation with Chris faded into comfortable silence which eventually ended when one of the doctors came by to talk to Chris.

Jill excused herself and went back to her room to think.

There was a lot for her to think about.

So many things that she had missed and even more that she might have.

She’d dwelt on it a lot since Chris’ return, wondering if there was something she could have said to have kept him from going out that last time.

Or if she’d encouraged it, keeping him going to do what she was missing?

Apparently she wasn’t the only one who spent too much time dwelling on things because the next day Chris surprised her by picking up the conversation more or less where he’d left off.

“One of the things attacked…” his words trailed off into a growl as he struggled to focus on what he was saying rather than whatever rage he must have felt at what had happened.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Jill reassured. There was a lot that she didn’t talk about and Chris had every right to do the same.

He snarled and shook his head, “Couldn’t shoot it, the thing was climbing all over him. Couldn’t get a clean shot.”

Chris stood up, started pacing the room like a caged animal. This was something he had to say, whether he liked it or not.

Jill knew the feeling well

“I,” he mimed grabbing something and snarled. It was just like Chris to dwell on the memory of something going wrong, someone he couldn’t save. Even the memory of the B.O.W. had him enraged and he curled his claws around the imagined foe, snarling and shaking it in what Jill was sure was a combination of what he’d done then and what he’d like to do now.

“It bit me,” he growled, teeth bared in a snarl of rage.

He threw himself at the wall, attacking it mindlessly.

“Chris!” She shouted at him, slamming her hands against the viewing window. Seeing him in that state was a special kind of helplessness because she was sure if she was in there with him it never would have happened, or she would have been able to get him to snap out of it instead of having to watch as he lashed out in futile anger at a memory, “Stop it!”

Chris’ shoulders slumped and he collapsed to the floor, back to her, the outburst having exhausted him physically and mentally.

Slowly, as though just moving took immense effort, he retreated back to the corner where he’d sat when he first arrived, hiding as best as he was able.

“It was too late.”

That was what upset Chris, more than ending up whatever he was now, that he’d once again lost one of his men.

It was something he’d never get used to and never gotten over.

The again, guilt over things outside of their control was something that they both had to deal with.

~oOo~

One of the things about Chris’ return that she enjoyed, despite not being able to admit it, was that it brought an element of spontaneity back to her life. There was no telling what would happen on a given day, which after so long of the same dull routine gave her something to look forward to.

She and Chris hadn’t yet had a conversation on their relationship, really what was left of it given the circumstances, but their conversations were starting to move in that direction. They’d both stopped pretending that her being returned to active duty was ever going to happen and even her getting out was unlikely. Maybe if she was constantly monitored and checked in with the BSAA doctors regularly, but that would just be trading one prison for another.

She told him that she was adjusting, which wasn’t entirely a lie. She’d managed to survive far worse, coming out alive and mostly sane so she had ways of coping. Chris being there helped. Horrible as the circumstances of his return might have been, that he was there at all made her feel less lonely and the loneliness had been the worst part. Even with other people to talk to she’d felt isolated. No one knew her like Chris.

And she knew him just as well, maybe better.

Still, it was a surprise when, after reminiscing about one of the missions they’d been on that had actually gone well, Chris asked if she was serious about wanting to come into the holding cell. It was something that he’d been working up the courage to ask for a while, despite her having repeatedly asked if he wanted her to go in there to be with him.

She’d been heading to the door, when he continued.

“Tomorrow,” he leaned against the glass to look at her, “Today let’s just talk.”

So they went back to talking about that particular, boring mission on a privately owned island in the Florida Keys because it was something to talk about, a rare good memory.

It had been a vacation hideaway belonging to a former Umbrella employee and that had been the only reason the BSAA had been called in. Right at the start of hurricane season, with a big one bearing down on them. Despite the place having been hit by plenty of hurricanes in the past and it not having been a concern, it had set a strict timeline for the mission, one which a change in wind direction had shot to hell.

Extraction had been impossible and they’d needed to weather nearly a week in a well-stocked, perfectly mundane tropical paradise. Yes, it had been abandoned for years after the owner had fled the country, so there was no power, but there were several pantries full of canned goods and nonperishables, some of which were still fine, and a remarkably well stocked liquor cabinet. With nothing else to do, they’d engaged in some decidedly unprofessional behavior and that was what Chris was focused on, all of the things that they’d done that they technically shouldn’t have because they’d been on a mission.

It was a topic that Jill could tell he still had an interest in the next day, when, after a sleepless night, she hurried to his cell. The standard warnings were given to her by one of the doctors who was waiting there to let her in if she still wanted to, which she did.

Chris even tried to dissuade her, reminding her that she didn’t have to if she didn’t want to, as though she hadn’t been the one to bring it up in the first place, and, after Chris had brushed it off, kept asking until finally he was the one to suggest it.

This wasn’t her doing something for Chris, this was her doing something she wanted to do.

Something that she’d wanted to do for years, even before it had been an option.

Before Umbrella had made things from her darkest fantasies real.

Chris was waiting at the door, but shied away the moment she entered, tilting his head to look at her with his good eye.

She smiled and took a step forward, knowing that she was the one who would have to take initiative. That had been how it always was though, her being the one to take the lead in anything. Back in their days together in STARS she’d joked that she was a bad influence on him, which was, to some degree, true. He was the reliable, dependable one in most things, while she was the one prone to acting on a whim, doing crazy things.

Except on missions, then the opposite held true. Chris would push on despite impossible odds, ignoring orders and commonsense to do what needed to be done.

If he’d been the one to go out the window instead of her…

“You don’t have to be here,” Chris said gently, making Jill realize that she’d shuddered at the thought of what would have happened if Chris had been the one to end up Wesker’s captive instead of her.

Things would have turned out differently and far worse.

“It’s fine, really,” Jill smiled at him, “Besides, I want to and you can’t stop me from doing what I want.”

Chris laughed because he knew it was true. When she set her mind to something there was no stopping her, but Chris was the same way so it balanced out.

He kept his head tilted to watch her approach, exhaling sharply when she reached out a hand to run her fingers across the uninjured side of his face.

There were scales there, some on the surface, some just little bumps beneath his skin, and they were cool and smooth to the touch.

He stood there, watching her, making no move to reciprocate the contact, but she could tell by the look in his eye that he was deep in thought. He wanted to, but was struggling against a whole list of reasons not to.

Claws twitched ever so slightly and he started to lift his hands.

Jill held her breath, waiting to see what he’d do.

His hands dropped back down to his sides.

“This,” he stared down at his claws, “Doesn’t bother you?”

“No,” she said quickly, too quickly she realized because he looked at her, trying to figure out if she was being patronizing, “I…”

She looked away.

Chris snorted, not angrily though, she could tell because he, very carefully, ran his fingers through her hair.

A confession had nearly slipped out of her, which was dangerous. Chris wouldn’t have understood, even now the idea would have horrified him, she knew him well enough to know that.

Instead she leaned against him, to let him know that she wasn’t afraid, that what had happened to him didn’t matter. He needed that reassurance, unnecessary as it might have been.

He hugged her awkwardly, loosely, which she assumed was so that she could pull away if she wanted to.

Even if she hadn’t always been fascinated by monsters she was sure that with Chris it wouldn’t have mattered, not after all they’d been through together. She was sure that she would have been able to look past the changes and love him.

Unlike now, where she felt a thrill of excitement at them.

There were places on his back where the scales were large and raised enough that she could feel them through his clothing. She ran her hands over those places, feeling out the edges of them until Chris made some small noise.

She stopped, “Did that hurt?”

Though she didn’t see how it could have, it was the only thing she could think of.

He shook his head and growled softly, “No, it’s just… this really doesn’t bother you?”

Now it was her turn to shake her head, and pull back just enough to look him in the eye, “No. Does it bother you?”

She’d meant her touching him, but after she’d said it she realized how else her question might be taken. Of course it bothered him, no one in their right mind wouldn’t be bothered by it. No sane person wanted to end up a B.O.W. and she expected Chris would say as much.

Instead he knew exactly what she meant, shrugging without letting go of her.

“It’s not that bad,” he looked away, knowing that it wasn't a good answer to have in his situation, even if hearing it was like a weight lifting from her shoulders, “There are times when I hardly notice it.”

“That’s good, I guess” she said quickly, convinced that the topic was upsetting to him, as she knew it would be for anyone, “That you’re getting used to…”

On some level it was good that he was getting used to what he’d become. Good for her maybe, but she tried to put herself in Chris’ place, not how she’d feel in his situation, but how he must have felt.

“It’s not that I’m getting used to it,” he stopped playing with her hair to look at her, really look at her, the way he had when they’d first met, “I know it should feel weird, but it doesn’t. It feels normal and when I ty to remember what normal is supposed to be…”

His lips drew back from his fangs in a silent snarl.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m here with you and we –”

_Can figure things out together_ , was what she’d wanted to say, but he interrupted her.

“Jill,” his hands were on her shoulders, pushing her back to arms’ length away, “Everything’s fucked up. You don’t have to pretend.”

She did though, for Chris’ benefit.

“I can deal with this.”

It was the safest thing for her to say, neutral and true, but only half of the truth.

He looked at her. After working together for so long he could sense the hesitation, slight as it had been. Chris knew that there was something she wasn’t saying, something she couldn’t bring herself to say.

He knew her well enough to let it drop.

Or maybe he just didn’t want to question a good thing.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly, barely above a whisper.

He was always sorry for things that weren’t his fault.

“Don’t be.”

She could see he was struggling, though not with guilt, at least not entirely.

“You don’t have to do this for me,” Chris said, “You can go and…”

He didn’t finish the thought, knowing full well that it wasn’t a possibility. There was nowhere for her to go and she was too dangerous for anyone else. After everything he wasn’t afraid of her or the virus she carried.

“I won’t though,” she put her hands on his hands, feeling the scales there, large and heavy enough that he’d lost most dexterity in his hands.

He watched her hands, looking for any sign of hesitation, and she probably should have hesitated, shown some apprehension, rather than guiding one of his hands up to the side of her face.

Chris shakily ran the backs of his claws across her cheek.

The edges of his scales were rough against her skin.

“You’re still you and we’re in this together,” she said quietly and then taking the initiative as always, she guided him down to the floor so that they could sit next to each other.

At her prompting he put an arm around her so that she could better lean against him.

This was almost normal.

Jill wondered how far she could push things.

After all on some level Chris had to understand what her goal had been. There was nothing to do here that she couldn’t do from the other side of the glass except…

She let her hand drift to his thigh.

Chris never moved.

She’d seen how thick the scales on his legs were and wondered, if between them and the denim of his jeans, if he could even feel her hand there. It couldn’t have been comfortable for him if he could feel it, the fabric against the edges of those scales, but it was a bit of normalcy and she knew the importance of it when everything else was turned upside down.

Focused on the feel of him against her, the places where she could feel the shape of scales through his clothing, and all the little differences it took her longer than it should have to notice that he was watching her intently.

Those little differences had held her captivated though, far more than they should have.

“Chris,” she looked up at him, giving him the look she usually gave when she wanted to start something, just to see how he’d respond. It was a look that she hadn’t used since…

She honestly didn’t want to think about how long it had been.

For a moment things were normal, or as close as they could be.

His hands were all over her, trying to get under her shirt, claws getting in the way.

For a moment she felt scales against her skin, and then fangs as he leaned in to nuzzle her neck.

He growled softly, fangs parting as he ran his tongue against her skin.

Things were different, he’d said, they didn’t line up.

She was fine with that.

She’d never imagined that a monster would be gentle and the years had only solidified that belief.

Chris wouldn’t hurt her, but he wouldn’t be gentle like he’d always been before.

Claws caught against the fabric of her shirt, grazing her skin as Chris clenched his hands with a growl.

Close as she was, she could feel the rumble start deep in his chest, reminding her of the way a cat’s purring felt when it was sitting on your lap, only louder and more urgent.

“You smell good,” he hissed, breath hot against her skin, his tone the same was when he was struggling with words or simply struggling to stay focused, “I…”

He was shaking now, claws tearing her shirt as he dragged his tongue up the side of her face, fangs occasionally scraping against her in what she supposed was the closest he could manage to a kiss.

“Jill…”

Then he froze.

“I didn’t mean to…” he let go of her, struggling to pull his claws free from her shirt.

She helped him because of how shocked he looked, as though everything that had just happened was unexpected.

“You weren’t going to hurt me,” she said quickly.

“Probably,” he agreed with a laugh.

At least he could laugh about it, even though he was still struggling to regain his composure.

They were both playing the same game now, pretending they didn’t want something because not wanting it was the right thing to do.

“You can go if you want,” he said quickly, not looking at her, “You probably should after that. I need…to calm down.”

Her hand went back to his thigh, a motion that she tried to make seem accidental just in case he noticed.

“Only if you want me to.”

Because right now this needed to be about Chris. He was still struggling with control and it upset him, so for now she was willing to give him what he needed. She could be patient.

“I don’t,” he said without any hesitation, tilted his head to quickly glance at her and then looked away.

His breathing was rapid, loud inhalations through his nose followed by sharp hissing exhalations, breath hissing between his fangs.

Jill wondered, given what he’d said previously about things not lining up and being different, if he could smell her.

Could he smell the desire on her?

“Is there anything you do want?” She asked, struggling to keep her tone neutral because even now she worried what Chris would think of her if he found out. What would he think of her for wanting a monster?

Still, she ran her fingers up and down the inside of his thigh, watching the way his claws twitched. Maybe he couldn’t feel it, but he had to have noticed what she was doing.

Did he assume he was imagining it or that her actions were purely innocent?

“A hand job would be nice,” he blurted out and then swore.

He clearly hadn’t meant to say that, though it was obviously what had been on his mind.

“Sorry,” he growled, “I’m still –”

He was still getting used to not acting on impulse, she knew that, but it was something he’d never get good at because he’d never been good at in the first place. Ending up infected wasn’t going to help with that, and besides, her hands were already at his fly. He’d asked for it after all and given her the opportunity that she’d been waiting for for so long.

“You’re not really…” he trailed off. It was an argument that he wasn’t going to put much effort in, not when she was the one who made all of the bad decisions when they weren’t on missions and this was certainly a bad decision, possibly the worst she’d ever made in her life.

And she didn’t care one bit.

Chris didn’t try to help or hinder her efforts, simply watching with a bemused expression, as though this wasn’t something they’d done countless times before, though arguably they hadn’t, not like this at least.

“You’re sure?” He laughed nervously, the way he always did when she wanted to start something in a situation that she technically shouldn’t have.

This was definitely one of those for so many reasons.

“I’m sure,” she looked him in the eye, “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t want to.”

She paused for a moment to slide her hand under his shirt, to feel the scales on his stomach, all different sizes and shapes. They were softer there than the ones on his back, more pliable, though she had to search for the edges of them, little gaps where his skin was still soft before she got a response.

He tensed ever so slightly, let out the smallest hiss, eye darting downwards to watch.

Seemingly of their own accord his hands drifted upwards, first to rest on her shoulders, then to run his claws through her hair. He was hesitant, as though he was afraid he might hurt her and maybe, given how sharp his claws were, that might be a concern, but she trusted him.

Maybe more than he trusted himself.

Relearning each other was going to be fun.

“Are you sure?” He asked again, nervously. It was more or less what he’d asked their first time, after a holiday party where driving her home had turned to walking her to her door to, at her urging, following her inside for another drink. The two of them, tipsy, but not drunk enough to regret anything they did, hadn’t even made it out of the living room when he’d asked that question. They ended up not making out of the living room after she gave her answer and not getting to the bedroom until well after the deed was done.

In a way this was the first time again though, she realized, trying not to smile at the thought. It had been so long and Chris had changed so much.

They both had.

Before Wesker she might not have been able to convincer herself that it was fine to do this.

Before Wesker she hadn’t appreciated how badly missed changes hurt.

This was the first step to relearning each other.

“I’m sure,” she said, unable to end further questions with a kiss the way she had the first time she’d given that answer to that question. He had too many fangs and, somehow, a kiss paradoxically felt like pushing things farther than what she intended to do.

“Really?” he persisted, resting his claws on her hands, not quite trying to stop her, but making things more difficult none the less, “Because things aren’t the same.”

“Things haven’t changed between us just because…” she trailed off, looking at the mosaic of scales and discolored skin. There were large, half formed horizontal scutes between his legs, like on a hunter’s stomach, rising up from his skin, interspersed with fine scales and areas of almost normal looking skin. Two of the scutes were spread apart slightly, something glistening beneath. It seemed that like with lickers and the mostly reptile hunters, the anatomy in question was largely internal.

That she even knew things like that, taken the time to research them, probably spoke poorly of her. Starting after she’d recovered as much as she was going to from Raccoon City she had folders of images on her computer, art mostly, but also some pictures. Pictures she’d wondered about on professional and unprofessional levels alike.

She ran a finger along the slit, pressing the scales farther apart. The pale pink flesh beneath twitched.

“Is this what you were worried about?” She wasn’t going to reassure him that she had expected this since when she first saw him, because that might have required her to explain why she’d expected it as well as what was to follow.

He shook his head, teeth clenched, “No, that’s not the bad part.”

What had been hidden beneath the scales pressed out further.

“You want this though,” she said as she ran her finger along the head of his cock as it flushed dark with blood and began to emerge. The shape was all wrong, flattened out somehow and fringed with short, fleshy protrusions around the sides. Almost tentacle-like they twitched as she played with them, “And this doesn’t seem bad at all.”

To the contrary, it looked amazing. The way those protrusions would feel against her, how they moved, she wanted to experience that, but knew she couldn’t take things that far yet. There was a trick to pushing boundaries, she’d learned it in quarantine. Ask for small, reasonable things first and escalate from there until her having the roam of the facility seemed perfectly reasonable.

This was so far beyond that it was laughable, but at the same time she could justify _just a hand job_. Everyone knew about the open secret of Chris and her and the sorts of unprofessional situations they got in, so this was reasonable.

Somehow, if she needed to, she could argue it was reasonable.

“You don’t have to,” Chris said through clenched teeth, keenly aware that he should make her stop and not at all wanting to.

She could hear his claws scrape against the floor.

He tensed, the slit between his scales opening wider as the head of a second, identical, organ appeared alongside the first.

Now she stopped.

She hadn’t expected _that_.

Chris looked at her, waiting for her response to that discovery.

Whatever he’d expected, it wasn’t for her, after a moment’s pause, to run a finger across the tip of his _second_ cock as both organs continued to emerge.

The fringe continued down along the bottoms, the individual projections growing longer and more mobile towards the bases of the organs.

As Chris watched, she ran a finger up and down the length of first one and then the other, the protrusions moving to follow the path of her finger. The organs mirrored each other, but moved independently, twitching in the air as the fringe along their lengths rippled and waved, almost seeming to reach for her. Slick with slime, the organs were far from smooth, rather there were rows of little bumps along the top and sides of each, which, like the tendrils, grew larger and more distinct towards the base.

The feel of them gave her all sorts of ideas, but those could wait for later, for now they were just something interesting for her to run her fingers along.

“Jill,” he hissed through clenched teeth.

In response she took one in each hand, feeling the little squirming projections moving between her fingers.

Chris let out a noise she’d never heard from him before.

The tendrils didn’t exactly get in the way, but they made it hard to manage smooth strokes so that she had to put more thought into what she was doing, where she put her fingers and how to move them.

She loosened her grip, let the tendrils wiggle their way between her fingers, flexing against them. Carefully, afraid of pressing too hard against all of the wriggling bits, she squeezed.

Chris hissed.

“Did that hurt?”

She started to let go until he shook his head and put a hand on top of hers.

Shifting his weight, trying to find a more comfortable position, he curled his fingers around her hand and began to guide her.

“Like this?” Jill slid her hands up and down, trying to figure out how to move her fingers around the tendrils, how to squeeze around them when they seemed to constantly move to be in the way.

“That’s good,” Chris panted, his fingers tightening around hers. He thrust experimentally once, twice and then stopped. His cocks continued to move, muscles at their bases tensing and twitching, “Like that.”

Jill tried to figure out exactly what she had done, where she had put her fingers, but the tendrils were moving too much, pressing and squirming around her fingers, sometimes with the movement of her hands and sometimes against.

At first she moved her hands in synch, but then, to mix things up she moved them in opposite directions.

Chris’ eye went wide, “That’s…”

She stopped.

“No, it’s good, just different.”

As though there was anything about this that wasn’t different.

“Keep doing that,” he urged.

And she tried, but Chris seemed to be gaining confidence as well, getting a feel for things and as she continued, muscles that hadn’t been there before moved more forcefully, seeming to struggle in her grip.

The look on Chris’ face, eye closed, fangs parted in a grimace of pleasure, let her know that it felt good, but it was nothing like before.

This was uncharted territory and she loved it.

Chris’ cocks moved, sometimes in unison, sometimes seemingly at random and she couldn’t help but wonder.

What would it feel like if those two organs were moving inside her?

Chris wasn’t thrusting into her hands, but the way they moved, side to side, up and down, and the way the tendrils were on constant motion, it wasn’t as though there’d be any lack of stimulation. She wanted to know how much control he had over those new muscles, if his skill with them would improve with practice…

The two of them together were larger than anything she’d ever taken before, but with how wet she was and how slick they were, she was sure that she’d be able to make an attempt.

If she’d been able to.

Now all she could do was shift her weight and press her legs together.

If she’d had a free hand she would have done something about it, but given what was keeping _both_ her hands full, it didn’t matter that much.

Chris’ breathing grew heavy, panting deepening into a rising and falling series of growls.

She closed her eyes, listening to the sound, focusing on little shifts in pitch to guide her movements, letting her know when to squeeze and when to loosen her grip, when to move her hands up and down and when to just let the tendrils do the work.

Like this there was no way to know it was Chris, nothing familiar, nothing human. It could have been something straight out of one of her dreams, the thing that she found in a lab, or was cornered by in the darkness.

Her own breathing was coming faster now, something that wasn’t lost on Chris.

He grabbed her, pulled her forward to grope clumsily at her chest. There was no care to what he was doing, no gentleness, just raw, animal desperation. Claws tore her shirt, scraping thin lines across her skin. He was shaking, struggling to hold back.

It was a losing battle, snarling, he squeezed, the way he might have in the past, but too hard.

She cried out, not entirely in pain.

The tendrils moved frantically, flailing against her fingers.

Before she would have known exactly what to do, but now all she could do was hold on.

Chris leaned in, teeth bared, and for a moment, just a moment, she was afraid that he would bite her.

That wild, inhuman look, unreadable and insatiable.

Jill shivered, but not in fear.

This was what she’d wanted, a monster of her own.

He hesitated, a flash of something in his eye, gone too fast for her to comprehend.

Then his arms were around her, crushingly tight.

She trembled in his grip.

Chris growled as he came.

The sound echoed in her ears long after the moment passed, leaving her breathless and shaking.

He continued to hold onto her, shaking as he slowly came to his senses.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, “I could have…”

“Don’t be,” Jill said quickly, not wanting what had just happened to be ruined, “You didn’t. Besides, I…”

Provoked you wasn’t the right thing to say, even though that was what she’d done. Putting it that way made it sound like she was shifting the blame to herself, which she hadn’t. Nor was she trying to excuse what had happened.

Because what she had done was inexcusable in so many ways.

Even if it was exactly what she had wanted for so long.

“You…” he sniffed at her, “Thanks.”

He knew though, there was no way he couldn’t have. Even if he couldn’t smell it on her, though she was sure that he had, he knew. He’d stopped, just for a moment when she’d come. Maybe she’d made some small sound, maybe it had been the way she’d moved, or looked at him, maybe they’d just known each other long enough that it was obvious, but he knew.

She’d enjoyed every second of it, as much, if not more than he had, but she wasn’t going to say anything.

The way Chris looked at her told her all she needed to know, disbelief mixed with something unreadable. Something he didn’t understand and maybe didn’t want to understand.

Jill couldn’t blame him. She didn’t understand herself, fantasizing about monsters and B.O.W.s despite everything she’d seen.

There was something wrong with her, deeply and profoundly wrong.

But it worked but in the end, didn’t it? If she’d been a normal, sane person with normal, sane fantasies, what where would that have left the two of them?

“I…” he looked downwards.

Jill followed his gaze. Her shirt was shredded and there were scratch marks across her chest. There was blood, though none of them were too deep, which clearly did nothing to assuage whatever horror Chris must have felt at what they’d done.

After all, there was a reason they were both in quarantine, different reasons maybe, but stemming from similar concerns.

“We probably can’t hurt each other.”

Chris looked at her, questioning, or maybe concerned.

“Whatever you have, whatever I have, the way the T-virus works means that we’re safe,” this wasn’t exactly the kind of pillow talk she’d wanted, but it, and what they’d done, opened up the avenue to so much more, “We’re not going to infect each other.”

He blinked, mulling that over, the implications slowly sinking in, that she genuinely wasn’t horrified by what they’d just done and what that meant.

“Maybe,” he said at last, looking at her as though he wasn’t quite sure what had just happened, “Maybe we can try something.”

“Maybe,” she agreed, as though what they’d just done hadn’t been anything unusual, and to be honest, compared of what she was already thinking of, it wasn’t.

There was a lot that she was probably going to have to explain, but the indefinite quarantine they were trapped in didn’t have to be lonely.


End file.
